


the last of the independents

by onedogtown



Category: Top Gun (1986)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Always a Different Sex, F/F, Homophobia, Pining, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-18
Updated: 2020-08-18
Packaged: 2021-03-06 08:07:02
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,673
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25966339
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/onedogtown/pseuds/onedogtown
Summary: They were friends now, so when Ice headed back to Miramar on shore leave Maverick invited her to stay at her place.
Relationships: Tom "Iceman" Kazansky/Pete "Maverick" Mitchell
Comments: 3
Kudos: 17
Collections: Rule 63 Exchange 2020





	the last of the independents

**Author's Note:**

  * For [simplecoffee](https://archiveofourown.org/users/simplecoffee/gifts).



They were friends now, so when Ice headed back to Miramar on shore leave Maverick invited her to stay at her place. And Ice accepted, of course, because flying at high altitude for too long gave you brain damage; you started hearing cracks about that way back at the beginning of flight school. 

She got in midafternoon, lugged her bags around by herself, took a cab— Christ, she was not spending her vacation clinging to the back of one of Maverick’s death-trap motorcycles, for multiple reasons—and made it onto base early enough to watch Mav’s class from the tarmac. 

You couldn’t see anything from that far off, of course. Which was fine by Ice. That was the whole point of not letting Mav meet her at the airport—pretending that she didn’t give a shit. 

She was pretty famous now, and a lot of people wanted to talk to her. That was nice. Mostly the ones who came over were vets—fellow pilots that she at least had to pretend to recognize. The new kids clustered around on the edges of the tarmac and looked shell-shocked, which Ice was sympathetic to, what with them having Mav as an instructor and all. She didn’t pay them much attention, but even so she could feel them looking at her. 

Ice had said in some interview how much it meant to her to serve as a role model for other female pilots, but that had been scripted. She figured that any woman who made it as far as Top Gun didn’t need the help. What really warmed her heart were the reactions from the guys who made up the bulk of the class. Let them need some inspiration for once. 

When the planes finally came in, Ice didn’t even turn around; she was absorbed by a conversation with Jester, who was saying a lot of nice things about her career trajectory. She didn’t try to figure out which of the incoming planes was Mav before her call sign became visible, and she didn’t obsessively try to pick out holes in Maverick’s technique before giving up in frustration, like she would have, back in the day, maybe two years ago. Because she was mature now, and shit.

It felt good to have some control over the situation. Even when Jester broke off his very generous assessment to comment “Oh, _not_ a great landing, guys. _Don’t_ imitate that,” she didn’t turn around—and that took a lot; the whole point of going back to school was to watch the best pilots in America fuck up out of sheer nerves, as entertainment. 

Jester excused himself—he had to take a call, or meet with someone, or something else that wasn’t interesting. Ice waved him off, and then she finally had to turn around.

Maverick had made it onto the tarmac, surrounded by a crowd of overly tall LTs. She hadn’t changed much since the last time Ice had managed an excuse to see her. She looked good; her short dark hair was pulled back into a scruffy little ponytail, and she was smirking, politely, up at one of her students.

The rest of her face was covered with dark sunglasses, but Ice could still pinpoint the moment that Maverick spotted her, because that was the moment Mav started grinning for real. 

“Holy shit, Ice!” she yelled out, right in the middle of the tarmac. That was great. That was what Ice had counted on, in case seeing Mav again made her lose her mind a little bit. You just couldn’t get this level of career-ending attention in a civilian airport.

“Been a while, huh?” Ice called back, and then they were in front of each other. Mav had pulled off her sunglasses. They beamed at each other, stupidly. 

Clenching your nails into your palms, biting into your cheek—all of that was for people who wanted to broadcast that they were hiding something. Ice just grinned, nice and easy.

Then Mav hugged her, which was unexpected. Mav hugged like a dude now—slap on the back, crotches angled to make room for Jesus— and Ice noticed that she winced slightly as she pulled back. 

“Messed up on the landing,” she said, in response to Ice’s look. Ice tried to swallow her own expression. “I thought—never mind. Jesus Christ, why didn’t you tell me what time you were getting in? I could’ve given you a lift.”

“You know, I didn’t feel like seeing the inside of the inside of a hospital my first night back,” Ice said. “Sorry to disappoint you.” Mav rolled her eyes; they’d argued about her motorcycle before, and the argument that ensued had a comfortable, homelike quality. 

They were at the door of the building before Mav said “I looked pretty good out there, huh?” Ice was proud of her character growth.

“I didn’t see you,” she said, which was true, although it was the kind of thing she was used to lying about. “Sorry,” she added, in response to Mav’s wounded look. “I had a lot of people to talk to. You know, I’m starting to think I’m popular around here.” Ice couldn’t really handle emotional honesty; it made her want a pair of sunglasses that would cover up her entire face. 

“C’mon, you saw me. On the tarmac, with the kids? That could have been you, if you wanted it. I look good out there, huh?”

“You looked pretty funny,” Ice told her, recognizing what she was doing but unable to stop herself. “You’re so fucking short.”

Mav stared at her for a second, incredulous. Ice just looked back at her, keeping her expression impassive. At one point Mav would have just punched her in the face; Ice wasn’t sure if she was disappointed now or relieved when Maverick just shook her head a little and started to laugh.

“I probably deserved that, huh? Same old Ice.” 

“Never changing,” Ice said. Her grin felt like a rictus on her mouth. 

Maverick laughed again, turning around to face Ice head on. Her expression was something close to fond, or maybe that was Ice deluding herself. She slapped Ice on the shoulder; if Ice had known her a little less well, she would have been unable to pick out the lingering stiffness when Mav moved her arm.

“C’mon, let’s go get something to eat. My treat— instructors get meals free on base.” 

They started out towards the canteen, but didn’t make much headway. They were going against a tide of students, not to mention instructors, visiting brass, and janitorial staff, and Mav stopped every single one of them to make introductions. 

“This is Ice Kazansky—you’ve heard of her, she was Top Gun the year both of us graduated,” Mav would say, so proud anyone would have thought that she’d had some part in it outside of losing.

“Ice, Monica Sanchez. Sanchez, Ice Kazansky. Best wingman I’ve ever had.”

“Chopper, when I said you needed a real pilot to teach you to maneuver, this is the one I was talking about. Ice Kazansky, Top Gun.”

“You know how I was the best pilot you’d ever seen? This is Ice Kazansky, she’d the one who beat me.”

It was flattering, for a little while; then it just got tedious. Ice waited until the last woman had wandered off, looking slightly dazed, before she leaned over and said quietly into Mav’s ear: “You know I have a first name, right?”

“Sure I do,” Mav said. She glanced at Ice, looking confused and a little annoyed. Probably she had meant it to be a nice gesture. Anyone else would have let it be that. 

“You’ve seen it and everything,” Ice assured her. “It’s on the trophy. I mean, since you’re so proud of it…”

Mav rabbit-punched her, not hard. Ice started laughing, although neither of them was being particularly funny. She felt happier than she had in months, just walking next to Maverick, rubbing theatrically at the back of her neck. Mav’s forehead smoothed out; she grinned back, almost shyly.

“Tonya Kazansky, best pilot on base,” she said. 

“Gold star,” Ice said mildly. 

Mav shrugged lopsidedly, looking embarrassed. The rough landing was fucking her up, Ice could tell. “I’m not an idiot, I know what your name is. It’s just… not how I think of you, I guess.”

How Maverick thought of Ice: a coworker, an impersonal callsign. Mav was looking away, back down the mercifully empty hallway. She had gone back to flexing the muscles of her left arm, almost absent-mindedly. 

"Probably wrenched a muscle," Ice said, conversationally.

"Would you shut up?" Maverick snapped, still moving her arm.

Ice reached out and touched Mav's shoulder lightly, just the fingertips. “You should get that checked out,” she said. Any kind of injury to the muscle was serious shit. 

Mav stilled as soon as she felt Ice's hand on her. "I'll get someone to check on it tomorrow, if it still hurts," she said, her voice suddenly tight. "I don't need you playing Hot Lips Houlihan, okay?"

So that was a victory, maybe. That was Maverick: she’d shrug it off when someone else tried to pick an argument, because starting fights was her job. Good for her, honestly. 

Ice pulled her hand back slowly, to show that Maverick was overreacting: like she was a kid again, picking fights with her little brothers in the cramped backseat of the station wagon. Just like that. 

Maverick was looking at her, wide-eyed; she was waiting for something, and she didn't even know it. And Ice wasn't going to give it to her, because right now, her self-control felt like all she had. If that crumbled away, she didn't know what would be left afterwards.

"You're a soldier, Mav," Ice said. "Fucking act like it, will you?"

The great thing about Maverick was that shit like that didn’t even count as a fight. They both moved on that quickly. It would have been easy enough for Ice to escalate hostilities, make the next few days awkward enough that Maverick would be too sore to reach out to her afterwards, maybe ever. Which would have gone pretty far in single-handedly fixing most of the active problems in Ice’s life.

It would have been the smart thing to do. Ice just— couldn’t. 

They got lunch, and then Ice spent the rest of the day just like she had wanted, trotting around at Mav’s heels like a nice little puppy. Meetings, a few classes. Mav got to introduce her to a few hundred more people, this time with a lot of stress on her first name. And Ice got a congratulatory slap on the back from Viper, which was gratifying.

By the time they headed home for the night—Maverick’s place, Ice reminded herself. Not hers— Mav wasn’t showing signs of pain. She was scowling hard enough at the papers she’d been grading that she didn’t need to. Ice knew her that well, now. 

She didn’t say anything about it. They went home in a taxi, Mav complaining vociferously about being parted from her favorite donorcycle for a few hours. 

“Are we tying both of these suitcases onto the back?” Ice asked her. “Am I supposed to just hold them under my arms the whole way? Shut up about it already.”

Mav sulked through the whole ride, which Ice knew was a great way to hide pain. Ice let her. “I’m taking the bags, go in and lie down,” she said when they arrived and Mav had paid, because it was too late at night for her to formulate whatever nightmare of reverse psychology bullshit that it would take for Mav to do something reasonable for once in her life.

Maverick glared at her and dragged both suitcases herself, which was predictable. Ice let her, just to get them inside as soon as possible. 

Probably Maverick intended to be just as horrific about who took the couch, but Ice didn’t let her. “Bed. Now,” she said, and when Mav glared at her like a sullen teenager: “That wasn’t meant to be a question. Come on, Mitchell.”

She recognized her own voice: it was the one she had practiced into the bathroom mirror as a kid, pretending to be Commander Kazansky. Maverick, luckily, seemed to mistake it for the real thing: after a second, she dropped Ice’s suitcases with a thud and slunk off.

Ice gave herself a second to glance around. It was a nice enough apartment, albeit one that had clearly come already furnished. No way Maverick was responsible for picking out all those tastefully neutral colors. 

There was Icy Hot and ibuprofen in the bathroom cabinet, and water glasses were stacked above the sink. She assumed the ice cubes were in the freezer, but her hands were full. Ice filled the glass with water, shoved everything else under her arm, and set off to find Maverick.

She was in the bedroom, sitting on the edge of her bed. It was the first time that day that Ice had gotten to see Maverick when she wasn’t trying to put on a show for anyone, and she looked almost incredibly tired—drained, even, to an extent that stopped Ice in her tracks.

She had also stripped down to her underwear, which Ice was almost as startled by. The uniform was in a sad, crumpled ball at her feet, and Maverick was in boxers and a sports bra.

“Looking good, Mav,” Ice said, leaning against the doorframe and giving her an exaggerated once-over. Maverick’s eyes flicked up to meet hers, then back into space; she grinned to herself, like she’d just told herself a really good joke that Ice wasn’t included in.

“You wish, Kazansky.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Ice said. She passed Mav the water and the pills, then looked away so Maverick could shake out whatever amount she needed. At least it wasn’t Tylenol. “Okay, now you can lie down.”

“You know I’m not actually hurt, right?” Maverick said. “I mean, you’re being nice, but it’s a pulled muscle. I don’t need the Red Cross treatment.”

“I’m not a nurse, and I’m not babying you,” Ice said. “You think I don’t know how it feels like to hurt a muscle?”

A flicker of something passed over Mav’s face—embarrassment, pain, whatever, Ice didn’t really care. She held up the Icy Hot, a little annoyed that she was being scrutinized for an ulterior motive the one time she genuinely didn’t have one.

“Or you can apply this to your own back. I mean, if you want.”

Mav sighed explosively, like she was really tired of being asked to do Ice favors. She did lie down. 

The bruising along Maverick’s back genuinely wasn’t that bad. Ice didn’t comment on it, partly because she didn’t want to admit being slightly in the wrong, and partly because she wasn’t sure how to play down an injury without making it sound like she’d just diagnosed Mav with upper back cancer, prognosis terminal.

“I’m going to have to take this off,” she said, touching the back clasp of Maverick’s sports bra. Immediately Mav started scrabbling both arms backwards. Without thinking Ice grabbed the hand that came closest and pulled it away, pressing it into the mattress by Mav’s stomach. “Let me, okay?”

“Fine,” Mav said after a pause, voice unreadable. Ice hadn’t even noticed that she’d been tense until her whole body relaxed out of nowhere.

Ice unsnapped the bra as clinically as possible, then lightly pressed on Maverick’s back until she turned over onto her stomach. No big deal, she told herself. Act normal, act normal, act _fucking_ normal. She poured a little of the Icy Hot into her hands and started rubbing it in gently.

Maverick’s back was smooth and hot to the touch, exactly like the back of any other person in the world. Maybe a little more muscled than most of them. Ice kept the movements of her hands as brisk and detached as possible. There was no reason for her to be reacting just because she thought she could feel the beating of Maverick’s heart all the way through to the other side of her body. Probably that was Ice’s own stupid pulse. 

The bruising was worst on Mav’s right shoulder. Maverick made a blurry, annoyed sound when Ice went back to do a second layer. “You’re going to want to sleep on your side,” Ice said. “Keep it raised.”

“That’s going to be comfortable,” Mav whined. “All fucking night?” 

The tension Ice had worked up inside her own head broke. She laughed. “You’ve had worse nights, right?” Jesus Christ. 

“Maybe you should tie me up,” Maverick said. 

Ice kept her hands moving—light, not lingering, nothing that would make Mav uncomfortable. The pause stretched out, and out. “Funny,” she said finally.

It was a joke; she was supposed to respond in kind. She knew that. It was just that it was late, and her nerves had been scraped raw from just one day in Maverick’s general vicinity. Mav could just fucking deal.

“Okay, done,” she announced, giving Mav a firm, platonic slap on the upper leg that she immediately regretted. “Put a T-shirt on or something. I’ll get you some ice.”

“You’re going to the store?” Maverick said, rolling herself back onto her side in one casual, almost lazy motion. Ice felt a shock go through her just as she looked away, like someone had flicked her hard between the eyes.

“Jesus Christ,” Ice said, trying to force her mind back onto the track of the conversation. “I’ll find something, okay?”

Mav was right; there was no ice in the freezer. There were stacks of empty trays, which had probably come with the apartment, just like the nice ecru couch in the living room. Ice spent a few moments disconsolately rattling them around, trying against all odds to concentrate on finding a single cube. She’d seen women naked before; she’d had actual sex with some of those women. There was absolutely no excuse for her to get girlishly flustered about this. 

There was a bag of frozen peas at the freezer’s far back, which Ice had to assume were meant for this type of situation only; Maverick wasn’t plausible as someone who would voluntarily consume Vitamin C. 

When she went back into the bedroom Mav was back on her stomach, except now she was wearing an oversized white T-shirt that still barely covered her ass. “Here,” Ice said, waving the bag around unceremoniously. “I hope you weren’t going to eat these.”

Mav made a face. “Can you put them on?”

“Sure,” Ice said. She would have liked for this to be another lengthy, intimate process, but it was a bag of frozen peas. “Side, remember?” she said, patting Mav briskly on the shoulder. Mav pushed herself up, making a sound of annoyance.

Ice draped the bag over Maverick’s raised shoulder so that it more or less balanced, feeling ridiculous. “Okay?” she said.

“I can’t _feel_ it.”

“Your entire body is going numb,” Ice said, just to clarify. 

“I mean, it’s not cold.” Mav gave an irritated wriggle, making the bag wobble dangerously. She must have been incredibly tired; Mav never did endearing shit like that if she could help it. “I can’t feel it through the T-shirt.”

“Try it out for five minutes, okay?” Ice said, standing up. She really needed to be in a room that didn’t have Mav in it. “If you’re still this mad about it by then, we’ll see about giving you frostbite or whatever.”

“Okay,” Mav said, and shut her eyes. She looked so fucking sweet. Ice was staring at her, feeling wordless and maudlin, when Mav’s eyes popped back open. “Sorry.”

“What?” Ice said blankly.

Mav shrugged with her one shoulder; the bag of peas quivered. “I just mean, this hasn’t been much of a vacation. We could’ve gone out, made a night of it. This isn’t much fun.”

Ice had no idea what Mav was even attempting to say. “Not everything is about fun,” she said finally, because it was the first complete sentence that came to mind. Then she left the room, quickly, before either of them had a chance to say anything else. 

She poked at the couch for a few minutes before she had to admit to herself that she had absolutely no idea how to pull it out. She didn’t know whether it pulled out at all, actually; when Mav had invited her to stay the night, Ice had assumed that that there was someplace for her to sleep. Maybe there wasn’t. Maybe Ice was supposed to sleep on the couch as it was, which was pretty funny, since the couch was only a little wider than the love seat and a little softer than the coffee table. 

There wasn’t a lot for her to do. Ice had to restrain herself from washing up the stack of dishes in the sink: it wasn’t her house, there was such a thing as being too pushy, if Mav wanted to pretend that she was living in her own private frat house then it was a free country, etc. 

She let herself fill up the empty ice trays, since she thought she could play that one off as a joke. 

Mostly what she wanted was to get a look at Maverick when Maverick wasn’t in the room to distract her. There was a stack of battered paperbacks on the side table, all blandly popular enough that Ice sort of hoped they had come with the rest of the apartment. There was a book of crossword puzzles, which for some reason Mav had decided to do in pen. None of them were even close to completed. And there were the photographs, arranged artfully over the mantlepiece—it was the kind of place that came with a mantlepiece, right over the yawningly empty fake fireplace. Very SoCal. 

Ice spent what felt like a long time looking at the photographs. They were really nice quality, encased in small, heavy frames with kind of cheesy engravings that Ice associated with grandparents—“Me and Mama”, “Daddy’s Little Girl”, “First Day of School”. The last one was of a younger Maverick in her flight suit, Goose with an arm flung around her shoulders. It occurred to Ice that Mav must have picked out the frames for the pictures herself.

The photos weren’t in any kind of order, but Ice could piece together a loose chronology. The oldest, most faded pictures were of a smiling, youthful couple who Ice assumed were the famous Mitchell parents. Maverick appeared, first as a chubby, happy-looking baby in her parents’ arms, then as a serious little girl posed by the photographer at her mother’s side. Then those cut out, too, and Maverick appeared next abruptly as a young woman in flight school. 

The rest of the photos were mostly of award ceremonies, Mav smirking into the camera (“Congratulations!” said the label on one. Another said, “We Knew You Could Do It!” Ice didn’t even bother getting depressed over the one that said “Daddy’s Little Bruiser” just underneath a photo of Mav being handed some plaque; she was too busy being creeped out by how kinky it sounded.) The rest were mostly of Mav with Goose, or with Goose and his wife, or their kid, Mav’s godson. Ice even found her own face at one point, in the front of the Top Gun graduation picture. 

But that wasn’t what she wanted, either. She walked to the door without thinking, wanting to run for a while, or—even better—to get in a plane and take off. But she couldn’t do that; she couldn’t open the door without waking Maverick, and even if she could, she didn’t want to be away from her. They only had a few days.

She was so stupid; she was so intolerably stupid. She’d known exactly how this was going to go before Goose’s wife had shown up on base, linking arms and giggling with Mav like they were sisters. Because she knew she didn’t have anything to worry about. And Maverick had no idea.

A crush on a straight girl wouldn’t have fucked her up this badly. What was messing her up was how little control she had over herself now, from pretty much the first time she’d walked into the classroom and seen Maverick’s smug face. Every ounce of the control that had gotten her through flight school, her fucking career—for whatever reason, it didn’t work anymore, and it had meant a lot to her. 

Ice walked back over to the couch, and then didn’t lie down; instead, she walked back into Mav’s room. Mav didn’t stir. She looked good asleep, her face soft and relaxed, like Ice had seen only a few times when she was awake. 

The problem wasn’t so much that Ice wanted to kiss her, as that Ice wanted to destroy her life for her. Because that was what this meant. Ice really didn’t want to wreck her life; she’d worked hard for it. But being a woman in the Navy meant that everyone you met just assumed you were a dyke, just for your career choice, and even if they were nice about it—Slider had been actually gentlemanly—it wore you down, because everything you did confirmed it. If you didn’t sleep with every man on base that wanted to, if you didn’t wear mascara and lipstick on missions, if you stayed overnight with a friend instead of paying out for a hotel. 

Ice was the first female Top Gun, ever; no one wanted her dishonorably discharged. And Mav was getting a reputation as a really good instructor, not that Ice would ever mention that to her. So maybe they would be fine. But it was a calculation, and Ice was too good a pilot to like anything that required calculations of risk; she’d been flying long enough that she was used to her brain doing that for her without her even thinking about it. She wanted Maverick, and she didn’t want everyone she in the world knowing her shit, and that left her standing paralyzed in the corner of Ice’s room, regretting sex she hadn’t actually had yet. 

Mav whimpered in her sleep. Ice stepped over to the bed fast, without thinking, but Mav just frowned in her sleep and rolled over, dragging the sheets with her. Ice shook her head, said “Christ, you’re going to be the death of me,” and sat down on Ice’s floor, back against the wall. She had a good view from there of the back of Mav’s head. She was too tired to think, way too tired to figure out the couch, and she didn’t want to be as far away from Mav as the other room; she figured she’d keep watch for a while, and then slink off in shame as soon as the sky lightened or Mav started to wake, whichever came first.

She woke up a few hours later, still tired, and with an intense pain in her neck from the position she’d slept in. She was still blinking miserably when a voice said “Oh, look who’s up.”

Mav looked great: she was on the bed, wrapped up snugly in a sheet— except for her hands, which were both cradling a coffee mug. She looked like she’d never landed wrong in her life. Ice’s teeth felt like she’d been eating Superglue, and she’d drooled a little on the bureau where she’d leaned on it in her sleep. 

“You couldn’t have woken me up?” she said. Her voice sounded terrible. She was putting all human effort into not tasting the inside of her own mouth. 

“You could’ve taken the other side of the bed,” Mav said. She raised the mug as much as the bundling allowed. “C’mon, you’ll feel better.”

“I have to piss,” Ice snapped, and pushed herself to her feet, trying not to yowl. She felt as if every muscle in her body had atrophied overnight. 

On the way to the bathroom, Ice detoured to the living room, where she took another look at the couch. It wasn’t a pullout. She didn’t know why she’d been so convinced that it was. 

When she exited the bathroom, Mav was clearly waiting for her— in the loveseat nearest to the bathroom door, still grinning disconcertingly. _”So,”_ she said, meaningfully. Ice walked past her without looking. 

The kitchen was just as small and sad-looking as ever, but the sunlight that streamed in through the windows gave it an incongruent, Good Housekeeping kind of feeling. Ice poured herself a cup of coffee. “Something you want to talk about?” she said. 

“Yeah, you could say that,” Mav said from behind her. There was a long pause. Finally Mav said, “You’re still coming onto the base with me today, right? You said you’d help me demonstrate some drills for the kids.”

The kids: Maverick always talked about her students in the same quasi-benevolent tone, as if she really thought that there was a noticeable age difference there. It was a little cute. 

“Sure, if you pay for the taxi,” Ice said, rattling the mug to show that she was occupied and not really paying attention to the conversation. “I’d like to actually survive the commute, if that’s okay with you.”

“You’re scared out of your mind, aren’t you?” Mav said.

Ice hesitated for a second, and then gave up and said “Yep.”

She turned around. Maverick was looking straight at her. Her back was against the refrigerator, arms tightly crossed in front of her chest. The expression on her face was the opposite of what Ice had expected; it was the same expression as the little girl in the mantlepiece photographs. She wasn’t going to move first. Ice could tell. 

Mav just looked at her, intent and not really hopeful. After a second she ducked her head and pushed a hand through her hair. 

The fact that Mav wasn’t looking directly at her was, maybe, the only thing that let Ice put her mug down on the linoleum counter and take a step. And then another. It wasn’t a big kitchen. So there she was, standing directly in front of Maverick— looking down at her, even. 

It was a trick of the angle, but Mav looked different when she was looking up at someone. Maybe it was just that she was quiet for once in her life. Ice wasn’t thinking about that; she wasn’t thinking about anything. She put a hand under Mav’s jaw, and kissed her. 

She started to pull back back after a second, and Mav made a weird, pained noise and moved forward abruptly, wrapping both arms around Ice’s neck. Ice made an involuntary sound of her own in response, a pleased one. This was a lot closer to how she’d imagined this happening. 

Mav’s arms were tugging painfully at her hair, and Ice liked that; she thought about pressing Mav up against the refrigerator, but decided to let Mav take the lead for now, since she seemed to be enjoying herself. Well— they both were. Ice could feel little sparks of pleasure going up and down her spine. She felt absolutely crazy. 

They pulled apart after a minute. Ice took a step back. She reached for her coffee. 

“So,” she said, taking a little bit of pleasure in enunciating the word in the same way Maverick had.

 _“So,”_ Mav said, and started laughing. “Jesus, Kazansky, you’re a dark horse. What the fuck was that?”

“Oh, you didn’t like it?” Ice said, tucking a smile away at the corners of her mouth. 

“I literally have no idea what you’re going to do, at any time,” Mav said. “Do you know how that feels?”

“You know, they made up a word for that. Starts with an M—“

“We’re never going to mention this again, are we?” Mav said. She shook her head. “This whole thing is going to turn out to be another Ice Kazansky power play.”

“I guess that’s up to you,” Ice said. She took a sip of coffee.

“Huh,” Mav said. Ice couldn’t read her tone at all. “Do you want breakfast? I can make eggs.”

Ice said that sounded fine, and was punished by having to watch Maverick scramble eggs with the technique of a drunk toddler. First she cracked the eggs directly into the pan; next she whisked them, awkwardly, with a spoon; finally she turned the on the stovetop, and settled the pan down with an air of triumph. 

Mav said: “What I keep thinking is— should I have tried to get injured a year ago? Two years? It kind of seems like that’s a turn-on for you.”

Ice made a face. 

“I don’t have a ton of experience here,” she said, honestly. “Sleeping with other enlisted officers, I mean.”

“Are we sleeping together? That’s nice,” Mav said, eyes glued to the pan. There was a long, relatively peaceful pause.

Ice was thinking, a little grimly, that early morning was probably the worst time for revelations of this type, since they’d be on base for the entire rest of the day. And surrounded by coworkers. The vacation would last another nine days, which had seemed almost obscenely long back when she had been planning it out. After that, they’d be apart for months. 

She had to find fault with something, or she’d have to think about how much her life had just changed. For the better, probably, no matter how it turned out. But still, a change. 

“Here,” Mav said briskly, spooning half the scrambled eggs onto a plate. Ice took it, and started to move towards the table. “And we’re not getting a taxi, by the way. I’m giving you a ride.”

“Sure,” Ice said, mildly. “Let’s see if you can hack it.” 

The eggs tasted fine. They were good, actually. Ice shouldn’t have been surprised. It was pretty hard to ruin eggs.


End file.
